Weight

This is, again, a difficult piece--It is mostly an essay, but I feel what I said was important, and that it was mostly phrased well.

I think most people have their 'ideal' weight. Most women, if nothing less, and I am sure an overflowing, two-handed fistful of men as well. At least in the 'civilized' world, in the decadent world where it harder to abstain then indulge, where disease and denial are more honorable, more a sign of success then anything else. I think most who don't, did, and confronted it and freed themselves. But our society teaches us to worry so much about the appearance of skin and bones, and cares very little for that which should rest between the two.
America is in love with the chameleon of the middle ages, the creature that can change itself to fit any situation and survives upon the air alone.
I have never really been called ugly, and truly never been called fat; the one incident I do remember is a friend laughing at red lines on my stomach from when I had been curled up for a good 20 minutes. She called them 'fat lines', and looking back, she was no stick thin, heroin chic girl - she was probably more amused that skinny girls got 'fat lines' too.
Regardless, at 5'8" and 128 lbs, I have my ideal weight.

118.
The magic number, the perfect three digits. I can't promise myself I will look how I want to look at those numbers, that my stomach will be flat, that my thighs won't ever touch, that my arms will narrow between joints at the loss of ten lbs. No, more likely I will simply lose my new-found ability to fill the cups of my bras. But I want those number, those three. 1-1-8.
Because 118 is what I weighed in 8th grade. That was the number I wrote on my modeling applications, back when I was 5'4" and still had dreams I was pretty enough to make it in that business. 118 was what I weighed before I noticed that I did have an unattractive flaring at the stomach, no bikini body here. 118 was what I weighed before the summer that I started refusing to wear shorts because of how wide my thighs were when I sat down. 118. My weight before my world fell apart, when I still felt like the prettiest girl in the world, when I couldn't concieve of a time when my life wasn't going all the right directions. When I was sure I would be popular in high school. When I was sure I would be a model. When I was sure everyone would love me.
4 years, 4 inches, and 10 pounds later, I have also lived through being a self-made recluse in high school, having one serious boyfriend and few serious suitors, body dysphoria, depression, and self-injury. And I made it through to the other side. I fixed my mistakes. Except for those 10 pounds.
And I know my weight -now- is healthy, is excellent really, given the percentage that is muscle. I know that. I know that I will not lost ten pounds easily because of that. I know it would require a return to a kind of masochism--a delight in every refusal of meals, a delight in the cramping of a near-empty stomach, a delight in the burn and the exhaustion and the delirium of pushing exercise too hard.
I have tried, before. The will required astounds me and defeats me everytime. That anorexics often have not the will to defeat their disease (not that they are weak, no, but that even when they dig their heels in and push as hard as they can it is not enough!), when it took so much to suffer it--that terrifies me. So I don't, I eat, I ignore the scale, I suck it it and push it up and corset it away at times and I pretend it doesn't bother me. Because I say now that all I want is 118. But I am scared that if I got to there and didn't have the reflection I wanted, fell too in love with aches and pains, fell too in love with the rewarding drop of numbers, the testimony to discipline--I am afraid I would keep wearing myself away.
I have a lifetime of voices telling me You are a pretty girl.
I have a lifetime of images, a lifetime of perfectionism saying But you aren't the prettiest one.

I tell myself: Get busy living, or get busy dying.
I have tried dying: I have tried the drugs and the slutting and the cutting and selling my soul to anyone who looked twice. I have tried the crying and the hate. I am done with it.
I am LIVING.
And as much as those three numbers nag me, as they call to me, I will be the girl I was at 118 when the modeling agency said I had to lose 10 lbs to make it in New York. I will be the girl who walked away because she was not willing to kill herself for approval.
Being that girl in spirit means so much more then in body.